Redesigning Unique Carpets' Website
Role
Team
Timeline
April - July 2022
Unique Carpets was ready for a change
After nearly two decades of operating their business through the same website designed to showcase their product portfolio, Unique Carpets reached out to me to lead a site redesign. Unique Carpets is a leading importer of tufted wool carpets with an ever-growing product lineup. The company also recently underwent significant internal restructuring, bringing in new leadership. This and their continued drive to be a market leader after being in the space for 40 years came the need for a new, elegant website that can seamlessly grow with the company’s operations.
This redesign came with a couple of challenges
A large product catalog with many variables
Unique Carpets' 90 products (aka styles) are organized within 7 collections.
Combined, there are 500+ colorways amongst all the styles.
Some Styles have add-ons called Edge Treatment Options, of which there are 44.
Other Styles have an add-on called Custom Color Options, of which there are 98.
Some Styles don't have any colorways, but do have custom color options to choose from.
Some Styles, known as Mill Specials, don't have any add-ons but do have additional, frequently updated specs, that need to be shown.
Difficult navigation & SEO issues
Navigating through their old website felt cumbersome and dated. There was also a plethora of SEO issues on the site due to the way the site was set up. There were 1,968 pages. 992 of those pages were blocked, broken, or redirected. This indicates an inefficient site architecture and negative impacts on the SEO.
So I set some goals
Design a streamlined information architecture
Unlike the previous website, the new one should make it easy to access all 90 products and their combined 642 variations.
Leverage e-commerce tools for a business run on in-person sales
Unique Carpets doesn't sell any of its products online. However, they desired the ability for users to request free samples of most products' colorways. So, we chose to build the site on Webflow's scalable and easy-to-manage e-commerce architecture. Even though all of the samples on the site would cost $0, this would provide the advantage of creating a more immersive and familiar experience for users as they go through the ‘buying’ journey.
Design a modern, yet timeless visual identity
It's safe to say that Unique Carpets is a company within a classic industry; carpets aren't the most exciting product out there. My goal was to gather inspiration from successful e-commerce players within different industries to help Unique Carpets stand out from the rest of the carpet industry.
Crafting the new website design
Starting with the information architecture
I began by designing the sitemap to determine how various aspects of the CMS system, filters, and templates would connect.
Establishing consistency with a design system
With so many product pages amongst multiple templates and eventual handoff to a developer, I knew that creating a design system would help with consistency and scalability. The design consists of 2 fonts (Libre Baskerville & Inter), 3 colors, and multiple card-based layouts with different states.
Creating the visual design to package it all together
Collections catalog & Style pages
The 9 collections are all accessible within a single page and are efficiently organized with search and filter tools. Clicking on a style will lead to the respective product’s page. Variations in products required there to be four versions of the style pages. Below are two of the variations, one showing a product that has selectable colorways that can be requested as samples and the other showing a product that has custom color options.
Sample requests & checkout
All items that a user selects to request show up in the cart. The checkout process on the Unique Carpets site is familiar and similar to a standard checkout on any other e-commerce store.
My learnings
Communication is Key
This was one of my most difficult client experiences. While it's easy to blame the client representative for not understanding certain terms of the contract, I learned that it is important to not rely only on the primary form of communication and utilize other methods that would likely result in a better understanding.
We primarily communicated over email and only met on Zoom when we hit certain milestones like the completion of the wireframes. While having written documentation for everything proved beneficial in the grand scheme of things, I learned that email-writing is an art form.
The client often sent extremely long and contradictory emails that did not share the same tone as his true personality. This was confusing and a considerable time sink. There were a couple of times when I called him to clarify a few things and both calls did indeed bring significant clarity. However, as the emails built up, it felt, in the short term, that continuing to respond to everything over email would be a more effective way to respond to all feedback, requests, etc.
This, in hindsight, wasn't the best call and led to frustration on both sides. The client-side communicated better over the phone & Zoom and scheduling more meetings for alignment would have saved a lot of time throughout the entire process.
User research is necessary
The client had a specific budget set aside for this project, limiting the ability to conduct research by interviewing Unique Carpets' customers and sales reps at the beginning of the process. The project experience felt like I was designing a site specifically for the client representative, rather than the company as a whole and its customers. The client representative would have been more open-minded to other ideas had there been insights and data collected from research and usability testing.
Developer handoff & collaboration is a process of it’s own
Little did I know at the time, but no-shows for user-testing are very common. We originally had a 2 month timeline for this project but extended it to 3 months simply because we dealt with no-shows in all 3 rounds of research that we conducted.
Ample time is needed for pre-project planning
As a co-founder of an agency, I often have had to switch between the hats of designer, salesman, leader, and business owner. It’s tricky to balance and ideally, more time would have been dedicated to researching the Unique Carpets and the number of product variations they had before the proposal was delivered. I underestimated how long the project would take. Entering all the product info, optimizing & compressing the images to load efficiently on a website, renaming the images for SEO, and then uploading all the photos (multiple times) was a big time sink and not something that was completely planned through when the proposal was designed.